A blog post I posted on my EN105 site ((:
Recently, there has been an interesting phenomenon happening on Facebook. Friends are starting to change their profile pictures to cartoons characters, which claimed to support a cause to fight against child abuse. The status appeared to be something like this:
"Change your FB Profile Picture to a Cartoon from your childhood. The goal is to not see a human face on FB till Monday December 6th. Support the fight against child abuse by copying and pasting this as your status and joining this group to support this sometimes over looked cause! Invite friends to join and do the same."
Initially, I was thinking that this is interesting, how this organization or this group of people managed to utilize a famous social networking site to promote a good cause. But, I do have my doubts. I was thinking whether changing a profile picture will actually result in awareness of child abuse. Logically thinking, I don't think so.
Today (6th December), interesting news regarding this "changing profile pictures to cartoons characters" phenomenon were widely spread on the internet.
Apparently, this tactic is a way for the pedophiles to add children as friends more easily since children are assumed to have higher affinity to cartoon characters. When these news came out, slowly, one by one, I see a trend whereby my friends are starting to change their profile pictures back to their non-cartoon characters profile pictures.
Personally, I would not say all these gestures do not impact the netizens. People do start to notice the trend. People start to be curious. Then for those who couldn't resist the curiosity, would start to google to find out what exactly is happening. Tadah! What they found out would be articles on how these campaigns are to raise awareness for certain causes.
Then, what's next?
Most people, after reading through the articles on the websites, close them, and probably say: "So this was what all this hype about". So, what happen to the create awareness part?
They haven't google for "breast cancer" or "child abuse" but instead, they googled for "changing facebook status", "bra colours", "cartoon characters". What they merely found out would be that there are campaigns raising awareness on these issues. But, their awareness on these issues were not raised.
Despite saying all these, I do see a potential way to market our forum! We could create a hype in NTU students by coming out with this tactic - changing your facebook status, and see how fast this viral marketing method would spread. Hopefully, it will create as much impact as it does to the anti-child abuse campaign, at least, to the NTU student population, in our case.
I can't wait till the end of exam to try out this viral marketing method! (: